On My Reading List This Weekend
The bell of the discourse ball this week was “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” from The Cut. A doozy indeed, the piece highlights the writer’s own anxious relationship to her own youth and the transactional dynamics she’s observed in her own relationship as a result, only to generalize those dynamics as existing in all relationships too. She writes:
“My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on.”
Hmm. Congrats on the inevitable book deal, I guess! As the product of an age-gap relationship myself I have very little to contribute other than I think the writer’s appraisal of her marriage as transactional is telling, especially when she reverts to suggesting that men aren’t also supposed to benefit from romantic partnership. And speaking of NYmag’s absolute chokehold on the gender war discourse beat…
Andrew Huberman’s mechanisms of control (Intelligencer)
Merve Emre on Anatomy of a Fall (!) (NYRB): “More than a wife or mother, she identifies as a person who manipulates the conditions of reality with her words.”
The age of cultural stagnation (The New Republic)
Now that KateGate has finally quieted down, kind of need the bored Swifties to shift their focus to Boeing instead — especially because I fly home on one this weekend — thanks! (Prospect)
What happens to the stay-at-home girlfriend after a breakup? (Cosmopolitan)
Endo Days: are celebrity surgeons boosting awareness or their own brand? (The Baffler)
A gorgeous meditation on death and the Chicago Manual of Style (The Offing)
On what gets left behind when assembling stories from the lives of others (Defector): “Creating a narrative from real life requires some element of misdirection.”
Life in a luxury hotel for new moms and babies (The New Yorker)
The Sphere (The Paris Review): “Perhaps it felt hard to believe that anything it might project or hold would live up to its own ambition, that the dream of galvanizing mass culture is dead.”
More Merve, this time in convo with Moira Donegan (NYRB)
A descendant’s call for whale legal personhood (Atmos)
Terry Nguyen on the beauty of a hometown mall (Are.na)
Paintings of women reading in suspicious abundance (Arboretum of Notes)
How Jesse Plemmons came to star in, well, pretty much everything (Texas Monthly)
The emperor’s wearing Brandy Melville (Delude)
And lastly, a thread about older artists painting their wives that made me smile.